Crowne Plaza

When we traveled to Qingdao, China in 2007 to meet our daughter, we stayed in the Crowne Plaza. I’m not really a hotel person – most of my travel has involved youth hostels – so I had never heard of the place before. It was comfortable and fancy but hardly registered at the time because we had big emotional stuff going on.

The only thing about it that really stuck in my mind was the tagline on all the stationery and swag:

Crowne Plaza – a place to meet

When I went back with my daughter in 2015 to visit and explore, I chose a much more quirky and historical hotel as our base of operations. But one day, as we wandered around the city, we stumbled on a family historical site – the Crowne Plaza Hotel we stayed in on the trip when we met our daughter.